"What are you making?"

I'm repeatedly reminded of a story I heard when I was still in my teens, a story told by a traveling pastor who was guest speaker at my church. He said that when he was a small boy, he liked to go to visit his grandma's house. His grandma liked to embroider and cross stitch, and he would sit at her feet and play with his toys while she worked.

Sometimes he would look up at the back of her fabric, where the colors of threads passed over and under one another, and the thread tails would hang down in a tangled, jumbled mess. And he would say, "Grandma, what are you making?"

Then his grandma would turn the work around so that he could see it from the right side, and it would be a beautiful picture, colorful and pleasant. He said sometimes we wonder what God is making, when we see what appears to be a tangled jumble, but that's because we're not seeing it from the right side, the finished side. God is working a beautiful picture in our lives even when we can't see it yet.

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The carpet stretcher man came today to repair the carpet in our classroom upstairs. Now, this is a very large room, almost the size of two bedrooms together, and when we no longer needed it for school, it became The Room For Homeless Stuff. If we didn't know what to do with something, that's where it went. And I'm such a packrat. Needless to say, even with literally days of sorting and packing under my belt in that room alone, it was still crammed full as of this afternoon, when the carpet man said it aaaaaalllllllllll had to go out.

Now, the entire upstairs - seriously, the whole thing - looks like the classroom threw up on it. 

I refuse to put these, um, priceless items back in the classroom, so I'm going to sort them where they lay. But I am looking at the tangled, jumbled mess and having a complete and tearful meltdown. I want to ask God what He's making sometimes, but I have to trust that the picture will be beautiful when He finishes with it and lets me see it from the right side.